Enemies

There are many different kinds of enemies in Borderlands 2, which tend to be divided into categories. Within each category there can be many sub-categories, which can vary in size, appearance, and behavior.

Bandits are the basic foot soldier of Borderlands 2. They're usually lightly armored and carry simple weaponry. If they carry a gun, they will hide behind cover and try to pick you off from afar. If they're berserk and carrying melee weapons, they will charge and try to smash you to bits. Some bandits climb on top of skags and ride them around.

Threshers are especially dangerous enemies in Borderlands 2 that can vary greatly in size. They can attack with multiple tentacles at once and hit multiple targets, making them especially challenging for groups as you need to attack tentacles individually before taking on the creature itself. They live in the sea and other environments around Pandora. To get a critical hit on a thresher shoot for the eyes.

Loader Robots should be a lot of fun to kill. They come in many forms, some with two arms and two legs, some decked out with many weaponized arms. Loader Robots can be dismembered and will not die if their arm or leg is blasted off. Instead, they will continue attacking and moving using whatever is left, meaning you can't fire and forget when fighting these things. Some loaders can fly and there are a wide range of loaders with different attacks and special abilities.

To get a critical hit on loaders, shoot their red eye. Another critical hit spot is the loader's joint between the arm and shoulder. To shoot off their legs, hit the piece of metal connecting their legs to their stomach. If this spot is shot enough then it falls off leaving the loader more susceptible to fire.

Spiderants tend to attack in groups. Like Skags, once you attack one many more will show up. They are weak to critical hits on the back unarmored abdomen section of their body, but take much more firepower to kill when shooting them directly from the front on their hard carapice. Like Skags they come in different varieties, including each elemental DoT(Damage over time) type. Their attacks include leaping at you, rolling and crashing into you, shooting webbing to slow you down and obscure your vision, elemental area effect attacks and shooting elemental balls long range. The queen Spiderant also has the ability to spawn smaller Spiderants to fight for her.

Varkids are noisy insect-like creatures that begin in their larval form. If their health is lowered, but not depleted, they can enter a pod to become an adult varkid. Once in the adult form, the same process occurs, except this time to become a Badass varkid. Then becoming a Super Badass, and so on. Some varkids never pod up, and some only under duress. Larval varkids are quite trivial to kill, but moving up to Badasses and so on gets much harder to eliminate. Destroying a Varkid Pod can earn the player more experience than killing the varkid itself.

Goliaths are large heavily mutated bandits that wear helmets to cover their heads. If the helmet is knocked off, the Goliaths will enter a psychopath fury. These enraged Goliaths will kill anyone and anything they see. When they kill they gain experieince and level-up, becoming stronger and fully replenishing their health. They can level up 4 times after being enraged. This can be a great benefit to clearing out a group of enemies, and shooting off a Goliath's helmet also unveils their grotesquely mutated heads, allowing for critical damage to be done. Midgets can also jump onto a Goliath's shoulders and ride around on them.